Z. Joshua x. 12-14. "Commanding the sun and moon to stand still."

On this passage Mr. G. bestows a "final smile of pity" upon the forty-seven. It is sufficient to say, they have given a faithful translation of this passage. The severest thing any body could say of Mr. Gliddon's remarks upon it, would be feeble, compared with the impression which will be made upon the reader by quoting his balderdash, word for word:

"Any proposed verifications of the latitude and longitude of Gibeon and Ajalon by tourists in modern Palestine, are mere 'traveller's tales;'* for Gabá-ON, 'occultation of the sun,' and Aial-ON, dawning of the sun,' refer respectively, the former to the west, the latter to the east, as points of the compass. Now, suppose two towns, one on either side of a valley, opposite to each other; the one Gabá-ON, on the western summit; the other Aial-ON, on the eastern; while a battle was raging between Israelites and Ammonites in the valley between and beneath. Suppose again, by anticipation of the text, that the twenty-four hours during which this fight went on, occurred at an equinox; and that it so happened, by a singular juncture of the solar and lunar motions, that, at six o'clock, P. M., precisely, the sun set in the west at the same apparent moment that a full moon rose in the east; you would have light for twenty-four hours in the valley; or twelve hours of sunlight through the day, and twelve hours of moonlight through the night. . . . Finally, in the Hebrew, these two lines are rhythmical, besides containing a play upon the words GBâUN and AILUN, by poetic license:

"To the eyes of Israel, O Sun! in the hills [B-GBáUN] even hide thyself: But thou, O Moon! be most resplendent in the [BâMKAILUN] valley."

What is the use of trying to argue with a man who talks such jabber?

It is useless to take up, one by one, the old sneers and trifling objections to the Bible which have been made a hundred times, and a hundred times answered. Mr. G. seems to feel special pleasure in gathering up the spent balls of such books as the

* It will be remembered that Dr. Robinson discovered their site.

Age of Reason, and of such orators as collect around the Sunday Institute. What a large part of them have to do with Types of Mankind" we cannot at all see, and we shall not follow them.

66

In regard to the objection of the uncertainty of the text of Scripture, which Mr. Gliddon parades so ostentatiously for impression upon ignorant men, we quote the following from a recent number of the North American Review. "It seems strange that the text of Shakspeare, which has been in existence less than two hundred and fifty years, should be far more uncertain and corrupt than that of the New Testament, now over eighteen centuries old, during nearly fifteen of which it existed only in manuscript. The industry of collators and commentators indeed has collected a formidable array of 'various readings' in the Greek text of the Scriptures, but the number of those which have any good claim to be received, and which also seriously affect the sense, is so small that they may almost be counted upon the fingers. With perhaps a dozen or twenty exceptions, the text of every verse in the New Testament may be said to be so far settled by the general consent of scholars, that any dispute as to its meaning, must relate rather to the interpretations of the words, than to any doubt respecting the words themselves. But in every one of Shakspeare's thirty-seven plays, there are probably a hundred readings still in dispute, a large proportion of which materially affect the meaning of the passages in which they occur." It may be added, that it is perfectly understood among scholars, that no one doctrine of Scripture of any importance and no practical duty, are at all impugned or materially affected by these "various readings." Nineteen-twentieths of them are of no more importance than the question, whether the words labor, honor, &c., should be written with or without the additional vowel.

A stronger case even than that of Shakspeare has lately come to the notice of the writer. From a comparison of the manuscript of Edwards' Work on the Will, published within the last century under the superintendence of his own descendants, it may be made apparent that the text is more at variance with the original and more open to objections of this character, than our authorized version itself.

Dr. Johnson long ago remarked, with regard to writing notes on Shakspeare-what applies with equal force to notes like Mr. Gliddon's on the Bible-that the writing of them is no difficult attainment: "The work is performed, first, by railing at the stupidity, negligence, ignorance and asinine tastelessness of the former editors, and showing from all that goes before, and all that follows, the inelegance and absurdity of the old reading; then by proposing something which to superficial readers would seem specious, but which the editors reject with indignation; then by producing the true reading with a long paraphrase, and concluding with loud acclamations on the discovery, and a sober wish for the advancement and prosperity of genuine criticism." If Dr. Johnson had had a prophetic vision of our annotator, could he have given a more accurate description? The "asinine stupidity of the translators," "the absurdity of the old reading," "the true reading," the "long paraphrase," "the loud acclamations,' "the sober wish for the advance of archæological deductions and genuine criticism,"-these all indicate the accomplished annotator, according to the prescription of Dr. Johnson.

Our purpose has been to follow Mr. G. in his "conscientious application of enlightened learning to the Hebrew text of Xth Genesis," wherein we are admonished that "commentators of the English evangelical school" are "of trivial value in themselves, and possess less weight in science," and that he is provided with "emendations from discoveries made by living Egyptologists, Hebraists, Cuneatic students and similar masters of Oriental lore." Points of great moment, the reader must infer, will "resile to our view" from such awful learning, "with the force of an Euclidian demonstration." Some of these points brought up from the depths of Mr. G.'s "profundities," we will collect for the benefit of the reader, to save him the labor of drabbling through a hundred pages and more of these foul

exhumations.

The writer of the Apocalypse was of a "post-Christian and uncertain age, between A. D. 95 and the Council of Laodicea, which rejected it as apocryphal, 360–369, A. D." The prophetic book of Jonah is of an "uncertain but recent age," and is a "mythe," like that of Perseus and Andromeda. "Daniel and the Maccabees are equally canonical in archæology." The

story of the fall of Noah and the curse of Ham, Gen. ix. 20-8, is a "mythe;" and the tenth chap. of Genesis was "written sometime after Joshua, son of Nun, had expelled such Canaanitish tribes as survived massacre." "The fragmentary documents, now called Genesis, were put together at some time, probably Esdraic, two or three centuries before the Christian era." Ethiopia should be rendered in all cases Cush, and designates almost all of Arabia, but never any part of Africa. The last is one of the great achievements of Mr. G.

Arphaxad, the son of Shem and father of Salah, was not a man at all, but a country, the same as Ur of the Chaldees. "There is nothing to constitute Heber an historical personage; but it is the natural appellation of a tribe in southern Arabia, the native country of Bacchus, the man with the two horns," and the God of drunkenness. Bacchus, then, will be the father of the patriarch "Heber, of the Abrahamidae or Jokidae."

Respecting the first, second and third chapters of Genesis, the author has pointed out "their Esdraic age, (about B. C. 420,) and the Persic origin of some of the mythes they contain.' Genesis i-ii: 3, is "an ancient cosmogenical ode with a chorus," which Mr. G. has actually set to music, under the title "Air of the Music of the Spheres." This the reader, "if he be a musician, can play on a piano; if he is a geometrician, he will find its corresponding notes on the sides of an equilateral triangle added to the angles of a square. We hope to strike the OCTAVE note some day ourselves."

Adam, we are informed, should be rendered "the blusher," and, as none but the white race can be said (physiologically) to blush, it follows that those Hebrew writers never supposed that Adam and Eve could have been of any stock other than of the white type. "Thus, through a few cuts of an archæological scalpel, vanishes the last illusion that any but white types of mankind are to be found in the first three chapters of the book called Genesis."

O te. Bolane, cerebri

Felicem!** instat fatum mihi triste, Sabella

Quod puero cecinit, divina mota anus urna:

"Hunc neque dira venena, nec hosticus auferet ensis;

Nec laterum dolor, aut tussis, nec tarda podagra:

Garrulus hunc quando consumet cunque.-"

Mr. G. is particularly anxious to prove that the negro race are never mentioned "in the canonical Scriptures, from Genesis to Malachi." Shem, Ham, and Japheth, represent the "yellow," "red" and "white races." To attempt a serious refutation of an assertion that is so utterly at variance with all philological authority, is quite superfluous. Suffice it to say, that according to all respectable philologists the name Ham signifies blackness, heat, not only in Hebrew, but in all the kindred dialects, with singular uniformity. We have looked somewhat into these authorities, and venture, from many others, to enter in a foot note a few of them, for whom the author professes to entertain profound respect.*

Mr. G.'s history of the Hebrew language is even more extraordinary than his philology. The Hebrew, indeed, is quite a modern language. Abraham "spoke not in Hebrew." The Israelites, "forgetting their mother tongue, adopted afterwards, in Palestine, the speech of Canaan; and calling it Hebrew, unwittingly sanctified the language of the slave. This again was lost in the Babylonish captivity of seventy years, and the Chaldee was adopted instead. The present Hebrew alphabet, the square letter, was invented some time subsequent to the second century. At the time of our translation, "in 1611, Hebrew had been a dead language for more than two thousand years." "In fact, the Hebrew language may be said only to have been revived within the last century, by modern orientalists."

It really does seem as if Mr. G., in these assertions, has labored to improve upon himself, by showing how far he is capable of outraging all acknowledged facts respecting the Hebrew language. There is a character of whom we are strongly reminded, in the play, who is "intituled, nominated and called Don Adriano de Armado. His humor is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general behaviour thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were too perigrinate, as I may call it."

Champollion Gram. Egypt. p. 152, 319, seq.; Bunsen's Ægyptens Stelle in den Weltgeschichte, I. S. 612, seq. 598; Champollion, L'Egypte sous les Pharaons, I. p. 101, seq.